Screening and discussion
Admission
General $12
Student $10
November 5, 2026, 7pm
Brooklyn NY 11205
USA
Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Thursday, November 5 at 7pm for La Merde! The Mole!, a screening of Aline Bouvy’s La Merde and Jakub Jansa’s The Silence of the Mole, guest-curated by Peter Sit. Created for the Luxembourg Pavilion and the Czech and Slovak Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, the screening will be followed by an in-person conversation with the artists moderated by Sit.
Through grotesque humor, vulnerability, and exhaustion, these two films examine the politics of representation and the social mechanisms of shame and exclusion. Their protagonists inhabit bodies burdened with expectations, whether as a beloved national mascot or a figure of disgust. Each film considers how refusal and resistance emerge within these conditions, through silence, withdrawal, or the disruption of social conventions.
Films
Jakub Jansa, The Silence of the Mole (2026, 13 minutes)
Mr. M. is an aging performer who has spent his life embodying Krtek, the beloved Czechoslovak Little Mole. Once associated with childhood imagination, care, and nonverbal empathy, the character has become a mascot of cultural diplomacy. As the boundaries between performance and life collapse, Mr. M. retreats into an underground burrow, where an unlocatable sound disturbs his refuge. The film asks whether silence signals a failure to act or becomes a form of resistance. The work forms part of Jansa’s joint presentation with the Slovak artist duo Selmeci Kocka Jusko (Alex Selmeci and Tomáš Kocka Jusko) at the Czech and Slovak Pavilion.
Aline Bouvy, La Merde (2026, 34 minutes)
An anthropomorphic excrement figure moves through everyday situations in which their body is disciplined, restrained, rejected, or made invisible. Shifting between puppet, animation, and embodied character, the protagonist encounters shame, exclusion, intimacy, and public judgment. Combining grotesque humor and tenderness, the film examines shame as a social construct and the mechanisms through which bodies are controlled and marginalized. Conceived as a feminist manifesto in the form of a cinematic essay, La Merde considers how internalized violence and repression give way to resistance and subversion. The film was created for the Luxembourg Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale and will be presented at e-flux in a special preview screening.
The event is organized with support from Czech Center New York and KulturLX.
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.
Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator that leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.
